Technical Field
Embodiments described herein relate to storage systems, and more particularly, to techniques for optimizing replication in a storage system.
Description of the Related Art
Various applications executing on a computer system may store and access data stored on one or more storage devices of a storage system. As the data is modified over time, the storage system needs to keep track of the changes, update mappings, and free up storage locations corresponding to deleted data so that these storage locations can be used for new data.
Accordingly, a typical storage system may execute garbage collection and/or read optimization processes to reduce the complexity of the mappings and data stored on the storage system. These processes tend to mimic user activity, and as these processes move data and create new mappings, original metadata associated with the data may be deleted. As a result, old data that was relocated for the purposes of garbage collection or read optimization may look like new data from the storage system's perspective. Accordingly, relocated data may be sent to another storage system during replication even if this data already exists on the other storage system. Therefore, techniques for tracking relocated data and performing more efficient replication are desired.